Note: Turn this off if you use systems that post to the comment form without visiting the page.

Lock Editing of Plugins and Themes from the WP Admin:

Turns off the file editor in the wp-admin.

Prevents plugins and themes from being tampered with from the wp-admin.

A2 Hosting Exclusive Optimizations

These one-click optimizations are only available while hosted at A2 Hosting.

Login URL Change:

Move the login page from the default wp-login.php to a random URL.

Prevents bots from automatically brute-force attacking wp-login.php

reCAPTCHA on comments and login:

provides google reCAPTCHA on both the Login form and comments.

Prevents bots from automatically brute-force attacking wp-login.php

Prevents bots from automatically spamming comments.

Compress Images on Upload:

Enables and configures EWWW Image Optimizer.

Compresses images that are uploaded to save bandwidth.

Improves page load times: especially on sites with many images.

Turbo Web Hosting:

Take advantage of A2 Hosting’s Turbo Web Hosting platform.

Faster serving of static files.

Pre-compiled .htaccess files on the web server for imporved performance.

PHP OpCode cache enabled by default

Custom php engine that is faster than Fast-CGI and FPM

Memcached Database and Object Cache:

Database and Object cache in memory instead of on disk.

Secure and Faster Memcached using Unix socket files.

Significant improvement in page load times, especially on pages that can not use full page cache such as wp-admin.

Screenshots

A2 Optimized Optimizations Page

A2 Optimized Warnings Page

A2 Optimized Advanced Optimizations Page

About A2 Optimized Page

Installation

Upload a2-optimized into the wp-content/plugins/ directory

Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

Click ‘A2 Optimized’ in the admin menu

Click buttons to enable optimizations

Check out warnings that A2 Optimized has detected that may be slowing down your site

Check out Advanced Optimizations that may help you identify plugins that may be slowing down your site.

FAQ

Installation Instructions

Upload a2-optimized into the wp-content/plugins/ directory

Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

Click ‘A2 Optimized’ in the admin menu

Click buttons to enable optimizations

Check out warnings that A2 Optimized has detected that may be slowing down your site

Check out Advanced Optimizations that may help you identify plugins that may be slowing down your site.

How does A2 Optimized speed up my site

Caching is the fastest and easiest way to speed up a dynamic website.
A2 Optimized will install and configure W3 Total Cache with the click of a few buttons.

Does A2 Optimized make all sites faster

A2 Optimized will speed up most sites; however, not all plugins are compatible with W3 Total Cache.

If your site is slower after enabling caching in A2 Optimized, talk to a developer about finding better solutions for the plugins that you are using.

Can I use A2 Optimized with WordFence

A2 Optimized is compatible with most of the features in WordFence, however you should disable caching and logging in WordFence.

Why use W3 Total Cache over WP Super Cache

W3 Total Cache is the only plugin that handles all types of caching. It caches frequently used database queries, objects and pages. It also allows the use of Memcached as a storage engine for cache.

Can I use A2 Optimized on any host

Yes. A2 Optimized works on any host that supports WordPress. Yes. A2 Optimized works on any host that supports WordPress; however, A2 Hosting provides a few more tools for speeding up your site when hosted on an A2 Hosting server.

Reviews

I thought because A2hosting is such a good host it’s Word Press optimization plug-in would make my Word Press site even better. I’ve had this thing installed on my sites for more than a year. It’s interfered with other plug-ins most notably WordFence. It has also sometimes interfered with the update of my Elegant Themes, Divi theme. I’ve had to disable this plug-in before the update would become available. Recently I’ve discovered it has been slowing down my sites and the reason I’ve had no comments on any of my posts the last few months is that it requests completion of a captcha, but doesn’t supply any captcha to complete. I’ve deleted the thing. A2hosting should be ashamed.

After experiencing the great service A2 Hosting provides, I heard about their plugin and assumed it would be of similar quality. I was using WP Super Cache so I uninstalled that and installed this plugin as well as their W3 Total Cache “optimized” plugin.

Using this instead of WP Super Cache, my CPU usage was down slightly but my physical memory usage and IO usage spiked very high, to the point of causing faults on my A2 shared hosting plan. Page load times went significantly higher, on the range of 2-3 times higher.

Uninstalled and went back to WP Super Cache. Given the quality of A2 Hosting, this plugin was a huge disappointment.

This A2 Optimized plugin has the optimized presets for the W3 Total Cache plugin which A2 hosting recommends people use on their shared server, although this is not strictly necessary. If desired, the A2 Optimized plugin presets can be manually changed in the W3 total Cache plugin. When I first activated the A2 Optimized plugin, it warned me the iThemes Security plugin was incompatible with it (I.e. W3 Total Cache plugin). I had previously read that deactivating the ‘Hide backend’ option in the iThemes Security plugin would solve the incompatibility issue with W3 total Cache. So I did this and then used the ‘WPS Hide Login’ plugin to hide the backend which iThemes had previously done. Unfortunately this did not solve the incompatibility issue and I got locked out of my website. (This had previously happened to me when using the iThemes Security plugin with another web host and might have been an incompatibility issue with the WP Super Cache plugin and iThemes). So I swapped the iThemes Security plugin for the Sucuri free WordPress upload version and this solved all the plugin incompatibility issues I was having. A2 Hosting also have a free site scanner in their Lite package which although is not as efficient as the paid for Sucuri scanner, it is never the less reassuring to have.
To summarize, the A2 optimize plugin did all the hard work of setting up the W3 total Cache plugin for me and let me know there was an incompatibility issue with the iThemes Security plugin. This has saved me a lot of time and energy and I am truly grateful for this.

I have a shared account and a VPS account.
Im very pleased with the support and all services from a2 hosting,
but Im very disappointed in a2 optimization plugin, it slow down my entire website, my admin dashboard its very heavy…not pleased at all.
When I try to disable a2 optimization and a2-we-total cache – my variable products are removed from woocommerce.
Now supports staff are working on fixing this issue.
But I will not to recommend to anyone. Maybe in other cases is working good, but with woo commerce definitely not.

Update gives me a warning that it conflicts with Wordfence. Support says ” the issue will probably be solved by disabling Wordfence and installing some other security plugin.” I’m not disabling Wordfence to use this plugin, bye!